


What's to be found in a sewing kit and a pair of scissors?

by jaythewriter



Series: Punk AU [1]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-MH, Pre-before-that-other-punk-story-i-wrote, Punk AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 16:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2276958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythewriter/pseuds/jaythewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jay thinks he's alone again but he's never truly alone. It's just that the company to be found is not company he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's to be found in a sewing kit and a pair of scissors?

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for panic attacks and a ton of self-loathing. This is indeed the prequel to the other fic I wrote, Getting Inked (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2255775).

Tim never used to leave the house this often.

Or maybe Jay is just more sensitive to him doing so, and he’s leaving as much as he always did.

He isn’t one to beg and give any cause for concern. It’d make Tim stay and watch over him but the need to keep from being a burden upon Tim as a boyfriend overpowers the urge to cling to his arm and ask if maybe he ought to stay home tonight, have an evening in. 

This time, he wishes maybe he did beg. 

“I’m not going to be back until around three AM, probably. This guy was hoping to have someone play strings for him and I think I can do that, so… wish me luck, won’t you?”

He says this to Jay as the blue eyed man hunches over his laptop, blankets tucked around his too-thin form when it’s easily over seventy degrees outside and he’s shivering. A warm hand strokes down Jay’s spine and he wants it to linger for a moment longer, to remind him he’s okay and that none of this is physical, it’s in his head.

But that logic has never helped him before. 

Everything living inside his skull has eventually tunneled its way out through his eyes and it has come to stand before him, taking on a monstrous shape and hungering for the blood humming in his ears. 

For the past week, the chemicals of Jay’s brain have sloshed around, taking on a dangerous pattern and dragging him into a place he forgot existed. There was no exact trigger; maybe it was Tim leaving him alone for whatever reason and the silence got to him, reminding him of the times he thought he had locked away as deeply as he possibly could. 

Waiting, alone, because that’s what he was doing by then. Waiting for something to happen, waiting for an answer, waiting for a friend, waiting for death. He was prepared for the worst and very much expected it. It wasn’t a good way to live, when there was no life there at all, so very little of it for death to take.

And to be alone in the dark, limbs stretched out on his bed and eyes to the grey ceiling, waiting again, he supposes he was asking for it, leaving himself vulnerable like that.

Hearing his door click shut and beckoning the waiting to begin, Jay sits up slowly, closing the laptop and tilting his head back. His eyes close and he breathes through his nose, reminding himself of where he is-- the stale smoky aroma of cigarettes, the musk he leaves behind in his own room after staying in it long enough to call it his own.

Is it that logic isn’t strong enough to overcome his paranoia or does Jay remain stubborn and refuse to listen to reason when he’s like this? He hopes and prays and it never leads to relief. 

No matter the reason it ends in Jay being certain that he must be some kind of idiot and that everybody who has told him so in the past years are right in thinking so. 

He wishes he had pleaded Tim into brushing off this stupid band try-out of his-- but it isn’t stupid, it’s so important to him and he has every right to go and try his goddamn best, and he’ll win it out and Jay will be proud of him. Right now though Jay loathes everything about it.

If he had other friends, other people he could trust, maybe this wouldn’t be a problem, but he’s too much of a freak to hope to find someone who could stand to be near him and not know the reason behind his nerves and paranoid-fueled moves to keep himself safe.

Freak.

He’s a freak. He’s broken. He’s never going to climb out of this on his own.

For fuck’s sake, where’s his phone? Tim said he probably wouldn’t be able to hear it going off if he did call or message him but so long as there’s a possibility that he’ll get an answer… Jay stretches out and pats around the bed, finding it hidden beneath his leg. 

His fingers tremble while they tap out a text, backspacing way too many times after slipping up and creating a word that doesn’t exist.

‘Weird question. What do you do to make yourself feel betterrwhen you’re low?’

Not perfect but maybe Tim won’t notice anything off. He taps his thumb against the blue arrow key and sends the text off into space. 

He throws his arm over his eyes and pretends that the room isn’t darker now than it was a second ago. Exhaustion can cloud one’s vision and rend it to perform strange feats. Logic, logic, logic.

(tick, tick, tick, the hour is counting down and the witching hour is upon Alabama, beckoning the monsters that lay sleeping beneath the earth to come and hunt)

(black fingers that blend in with the night are reaching through the window and parting the waving curtains, and invisible eyes peer at the shaking boy that’s within reach)

(he can feel it and he knows it’s coming, that there’s no escaping it if he continues to sit like a fucking lump in his bed, but he finds the urge to run is missing altogether, and what’s the point? what’s the goddamn point--)

The phone rattles against his chest. Jay couldn’t be quicker to pick it up.

‘I like to play music or talk to you. Or work on a new patch for this vest but that’s probably more of a thing I’d do since you’re not into punk shit. Why?’

Jay hesitates, his thumbs hovering over the letters.

‘Nothing. I just needed some thoughts.’

That’s not going to be enough to quell Tim’s fears. But it’s all Jay’s got, all his energy is focused on pushing his legs out of bed and standing. He hobbles past the handprint smeared mirror propped against the wall, next to the bedside table, and toward the dresser. 

The carpet presses painful patterns into his knees. He tugs open the bottom drawer and there, his most broken in pair of jeans, creased and rumpled and unpresentable. 

Tim is wrong about him not liking his new style. It’s amazing on Tim: his spiked hair forces him to stand out in a way that he never has before, and Jay discovered that he was secretly crafty. He worked those calloused hands of his until his shirts were bearing symbols that spoke of freedom and ‘giving all the right fucks’, as Tim told him once.

Up until now, Jay has never given himself the chance to think that maybe he could dabble in the style. It was Tim’s to own and something that Jay could only observe and admire from afar. He didn’t want to soil it with his scar peppered hands and give Tim reason to shy away from what could easily be considered a large part of his salvation.

Tim is the beautiful one painted into a brighter and more radiant light because of these torn and dark fabrics and the rough appearance of boots and a challenge in his eyes.

Jay isn’t beautiful in the first place, sullied by pain he refuses to let go. What’s the point of painting something like him when the paint isn’t meant to act as a cover up? Covering a shattered vase with a tapestry of a thousand heart-wrenching stories doesn’t save the vase.

But that text held an air of permission to it; ‘I don’t expect you to do this but I’ll leave the option open to you’. He doubts Tim would have ever stopped him, he’d tell Jay he was being ridiculous and Jay would nod and giggle but pretend the conversation never happened. Loving words cannot easily brush aside such heavy feelings.

If Jay gives himself a chance, though, like he gave Tim and Alex a chance, when Tim has told him a thousand times to spare himself the way he spares others-- what could happen?

What’s to be found in the scissors that he takes to these jeans, still letting the rug cut into his skin? Is there something he isn’t seeing here? Is he not letting himself see it, afraid of what atrocities may strike should he allow himself the mercy he gives to everybody but this boy inside his heart?

Within moments, patches of denim are lying spread out around him, and he sits looking into the filthy mirror he tells himself he’ll clean next week, definitely next week, and the room isn’t as dark, not as much as it was before.

He gets back to work, diving back into the dresser for Tim’s sewing kit. Jay remembers the youtube videos they watched together, the countless number of band-aids used on pricked fingers and the lost needles that eventually showed up somewhere in their blankets, just in time before bed. There’s enough memory of those shaky handed videos left in Jay that he finds he can sew the right patches together in the right pattern and soon, he has a vest on his lap.

Or, something that could be considered a vest, if one were to squint at it and tilt their head to the right. Sliding it on over his baggy and dark grey t-shirt, he finds that the arm holes are far larger than they need to be, gaping and going down his ribcage. 

In the mirror, he’s different, he’s taller and larger-- an effect that baggy clothing doesn’t normally have on him.

And that’s what drives him to keep going, because it’s not enough. He needs to grab his water bottle and wet his hands with it, running his fingers through his hair and having it stand, taking up more space, /more/.

(The room is brighter than he remembers it being when he started--)

That eyeliner that Tim tried once, where is it? It’s in here, in the bedside table where everything tiny and costing all of five dollars goes to die. He never wore it again after smearing it at work and being unable to get rid of it for the rest of the day.

When Jay accidentally runs amok with the wand and it comes out resembling a thundercloud eclipsed by his eyes though, he finds he never wants to leave again without these clouds to take with him.

His heart pounds, and for the first time in his life, he’s utterly delighted he was wrong.

Oh so wrong.

In all his fuss and muss, he didn’t hear his phone go off again, and he only realizes that he has a message when he drops onto the bed, breathless. There, Tim tells him he’s coming home early, he’s worried.

Jay grins as he taps out a response that Tim probably won’t read til he gets in the house.

‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

The bedroom is suddenly so much easier to breathe in, and he lets himself embrace it, sucking it all into his lungs and reminding himself that he deserves every breath.

The windows stand still and quiet.


End file.
